Thursday, May 25, 2017

Here's some news you won't read in the papers

Yesterday I wrote about the miasma of fake news generated about President Trump. Here are some items, again courtesy of the history Victor Davis Hanson, you won't be hearing on the networks.

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama used back channels to communicate flexibility to the Iranians (as in the later assurance he gave, on a hot mic, to the Russians), which may have helped undermine the ongoing Bush-administration negotiations with Iran.

Hillary Clinton set up an illegal server, distributed classified information in an illegal and unsecured fashion, lied about it, and destroyed thousands of e-mails central to an investigation — and got off without an indictment.

In the 2016 election, the head of the DNC conspired to massage the debates and help swing the nomination to the Clinton campaign.

The prior attorney general of the United State met with the spouse of a presidential candidate under investigation, in a stealthy conversation on an airport tarmac, did not inform officials of that meeting until the get-together was discovered by a reporter, semi-recused herself under pressure only to turn over her prosecutorial discretion to the head of the FBI, in a fashion that was both improper and perhaps unconstitutional.

We do not hear how exactly Russian interests at Uranium One obtained market control over 20 percent of U.S. uranium holdings, or the connections between Uranium One and their prior multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation, or that the Podesta Group had numerous financial dealings with Russian interests, or that Bill Clinton received $500,000 in 2010 from Russian oligarchic interests while his wife was secretary of state — ten times more than what Michael Flynn was alleged to have received.

We know now that many of the elements of the Iran Deal, the most important foreign-policy decision in the last 20 years, were designed to circumvent Senate ratification and hinged on secret ancillary agreements.

We know that unnamed intelligence officials during the Obama administration surveilled likely political opponents, unmasked their identities, leaked them to the press, either under the assumption that such skullduggery would not surface, or on the pretext that such monitoring was ordinary and involved national security.

We know that Obama’s director of National Intelligence lied under oath to Congress without ramifications. We know that a high IRS official subverted her duties for political purposes in a manner intended to alter the 2012 campaign, took the Fifth Amendment, refuses to testify further before Congress, and faces no consequences other than a plush, taxpayer-funded retirement.

Now we are also learning that the National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.